The present invention relates to a data recording apparatus and method, a data reproducing apparatus and method, a data recording/reproducing apparatus and method, and a transmission medium, and more particularly to those where AV digital stream data and random access data, such as text data other than AV digital stream data, are recorded and reproduced by mutually different methods so that both data can be handled efficiently.
As observed in the technological history of hard disk drives (HDD) developed as peripherals of personal computers (PC), technical improvements have been achieved heretofore in realizing faster random access to discrete text data with high reliability.
With the recent progress in multimedia and so forth, there are demanded further improved HDD and host system which can constitute an AV HDD system at low cost for freely processing, on a disk, AV (audio visual) digital stream data such as DV (digital video) (transfer rate 29 Mbps) or MPEG2 (Moving Picture Experts Group Phase 2) (transfer rate 15 Mbps), and random access data other than such AV digital stream data.
However, in the related art HDD and host system, it is necessary, for enhancing the reliability of text type random access data, to write the data in a replacement sector which is a space sector used when the relevant sector is defective, and also to execute retry (of instruction), servo compensation, temperature compensation and so forth. Consequently, in satisfying the requirements of both reliability and real-time continuity of the data being transmitted, there arise some problems such as the necessity of enhancing the fundamental performance of the HDD and a resultant high cost.
Intended enhancements of the above fundamental performance include, for example, increase of the capacity of a buffer memory, raise of the transfer rate attained by increasing the rotation speed, improvement of the performance of a channel coding LSI, a motor and so forth to shorten the rotation wait time, functional improvement of a servo circuit to shorten the seek time, and improvements of a head and disk media for realizing higher linear density recording.